Remains of a modern glacier found near mars’ equator implies water ice possibly present at low latitudes on Mars even today

If there is still water ice preserved at shallow depths at a low latitude on Mars, there would be implications for science and human exploration

Reports and Proceedings

SETI INSTITUTE

 

IMAGE: FIGURE 1: A RELICT GLACIER NEAR MARS’ EQUATOR. (NASA MRO HIRISE AND CRISM FALSE COLOR COMPOSITE view more 

CREDIT: PASCAL LEE

March 15, 2023, Mountain View, California – In a groundbreaking announcement at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in The Woodlands, Texas, scientists revealed the discovery of a relict glacier near Mars' equator. Located in Eastern Noctis Labyrinthus at coordinates 7° 33' S, 93° 14' W, this finding is significant as it implies the presence of surface water ice on Mars in recent times, even near the equator. This discovery raises the possibility that ice may still exist at shallow depths in the area, which could have significant implications for future human exploration.

The surface feature identified as a "relict glacier" is one of many light-toned deposits (LTDs) found in the region. Typically, LTDs consist mainly of light-colored sulfate salts, but this deposit also shows many of the features of a glacier, including crevasse fields and moraine bands. The glacier is estimated to be 6 kilometers long and up to 4 kilometers wide, with a surface elevation ranging from +1.3 to +1.7 kilometers. This discovery suggests that Mars' recent history may have been more watery than previously thought, which could have implications for understanding the planet's habitability.

“What we’ve found is not ice, but a salt deposit with the detailed morphologic features of a glacier. What we think happened here is that salt formed on top of a glacier while preserving the shape of the ice below, down to details like crevasse fields and moraine bands,” said Dr. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and the Mars Institute, and the lead author of the study.

The presence of volcanic materials blanketing the region hints of how the sulfate salts might have formed and preserved a glacier’s imprint underneath. When freshly erupted pyroclastic materials (mixtures of volcanic ash, pumice, and hot lava blocks) come in contact with water ice, sulfate salts like the ones commonly making up Mars’ light-toned deposits may form and build up into a hardened, crusty salt layer.

“This region of Mars has a history of volcanic activity. And where some of the volcanic materials came in contact with glacier ice, chemical reactions would have taken place at the boundary between the two to form a hardened layer of sulfate salts,” explains Sourabh Shubham, a graduate student at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology, and a co-author of the study. “This is the most likely explanation for the hydrated and hydroxylated sulfates we observe in this light-toned deposit.”

Over time, with erosion removing the blanketing volcanic materials, a crusty layer of sulfates mirroring the glacier ice underneath became exposed, which would explain how a salt deposit is now visible, presenting features unique to glaciers such as crevasses and moraine bands.

“Glaciers often present distinctive types of features, including marginal, splaying, and tic-tac-toe crevasse fields, and also thrust moraine bands and foliation. We are seeing analogous features in this light-toned deposit, in form, location, and scale. It’s very intriguing,” said John Schutt, a geologist at the Mars Institute, experienced icefield guide in the Arctic and Antarctica, and a co-author of this study.

The glacier’s fine-scale features, its associated sulfate salts deposit, and the overlying volcanic materials are all very sparsely cratered by impacts and must be geologically young, likely Amazonian in age, the latest geologic period which includes modern Mars. “We’ve known about glacial activity on Mars at many locations, including near the equator in the more distant past. And we’ve known about recent glacial activity on Mars, but so far, only at higher latitudes. A relatively young relict glacier in this location tells us that Mars experienced surface ice in recent times, even near the equator, which is new,” said Lee.

It remains to be seen whether water ice might still be preserved underneath the light-toned deposit or if it has disappeared entirely. “Water ice is, at present, not stable at the very surface of Mars near the equator at these elevations. So, it’s not surprising that we’re not detecting any water ice at the surface. It is possible that all the glacier’s water ice has sublimated away by now. But there’s also a chance that some of it might still be protected at shallow depth under the sulfate salts.”

The study draws an analogy with the ancient ice islands on salt lakebeds, or salars, of the Altiplano in South America. There, old glacier ice has remained protected from melting, evaporation, and sublimation underneath blankets of bright salts. Lee and his co-authors hypothesize a similar situation to explain how sulfate salts on Mars might be able to offer protection to otherwise sublimation-vulnerable ice at low latitudes on the planet.

If there is still water ice preserved at shallow depths at a low latitude on Mars, there would be implications for science and human exploration. “The desire to land humans at a location where they might be able to extract water ice from the ground has been pushing mission planners to consider higher latitude sites. But the latter environments are typically colder and more challenging for humans and robots. If there were equatorial locations where ice might be found at shallow depth, then we’d have the best of both environments: warmer conditions for human exploration and still access to ice,” said Lee.

But Lee cautions that more work still needs to be done: “We now have to determine if, and how much, water ice might actually be present in this relict glacier, and whether other light-toned deposits might also have, or have had, ice-rich substrates.”

Figure 2: Interpretation of the “Relict Glacier” ‘s features

CREDIT

Pascal Lee

About the SETI Institute
Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute is a non-profit, multidisciplinary research and education organization whose mission is to lead humanity’s quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the universe and share that knowledge with the world. Research at the SETI Institute encompasses the physical and biological sciences and leverages expertise in data analytics, machine learning and advanced signal detection technologies. The SETI Institute is a distinguished research partner for industry, academia and government agencies, including NASA and NSF.

About Mars Institute
The Mars Institute is a non-profit research organization dedicated to the advancement of Mars science, exploration, and the public understanding of Mars. Research at the Mars Institute focuses Mars and other planetary destinations that may serve as stepping-stones to Mars, in particular Mars’ moons, our Moon, and near-Earth objects. The Mars Institute investigates the technologies and strategies that will enable and optimize the future human exploration of Mars. The Mars Institute operates the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station on Devon Island, High Arctic.

DOWNLOAD FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE.

For more information, contact:

Dr Pascal Lee
Planetary Scientist
SETI Institute & Mars Institute
NASA Ames Research Center
MS 245-3
Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000
USA
E-mail: pascal.lee@marsinstitute.net

Dizzy apes provide clues on human need for mind altering experiences

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

 

VIDEO: GORILLA SPINNING IN VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK, RWANDA view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK/KUSINI SAFARIS

• Great apes spinning behaviours could provide clues about the role of altered states for the origins of the human mind. 

• Online videos observed great apes spin themselves to deliberately make themselves dizzy. 

• Researchers say these new findings suggest that the behaviour could be used to understand when humans evolved the desire to seek altered mental states and actively manipulate their mood and perception of reality. 

Great apes deliberately spin themselves in order make themselves dizzy, academics at the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham have discovered. 

The findings could provide clues about the role of altered mental states for origins of the human mind. 

Dr Adriano Lameira, Associate Professor of Psychology at The University of Warwick who co-led the study said: “Every culture has found a way of evading reality through dedicated and special rituals, practices, or ceremonies. This human trait of seeking altered states is so universal, historically, and culturally, that it raises the intriguing possibility that this is something that has been potentially inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.  

“If this was indeed the case, it would carry huge consequences on how we think about modern human cognition capacities and emotional needs.” 

The research team came across a viral video of a male gorilla spinning in a pool, and as they continued researching YouTube, came across more videos of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans all engaging in spinning behaviours.  

Through analysing over 40 online videos, the researchers found that on average the primates revolved 5.5 times per episode of spinning, with the average speed 1.5 revolutions per second and the primates did this on average three times.  

Researchers compared great ape spinning speeds and found that they can spin while holding on a rope as fast as professional human dancers and circus artists, as well as Dervish muslims who take part in whirling ceremonies to achieve a spiritual trance. 

Dr Lameira explained: “Spinning alters our state of consciousness, it messes up with our body-mind responsiveness and coordination, which make us feel sick, lightheaded, and even elated as in the case on children playing in merry-go-rounds, spinner-wheels, and carousels.  

“What we wanted to try to understand through this study is whether spinning can be studied as a primordial behaviour that human ancestors would have been able to autonomously engage in and tap into other states of consciousness. If all great apes seek dizziness, then our ancestors are also highly likely to have done so.  

“We asked ourselves what role these behaviours play when it comes to the origins of the human mind. 

“The apes were doing this purposefully, almost as if they were dancing – a known mechanism in humans that universally facilitates mood regulation, social bonding and heightens the senses and is based on rotation movements. The parallel between what the apes were doing and what humans do was beyond coincidental.”  

In many of the videos, the primates were using ropes or vines to spin, and it was in these videos where they were spinning the fastest and for the longest amounts of time. 

The research team analysed the videos and compared it to videos of purposeful human pirouettes, for example, ballet dancing, traditional Hopak dancing, whirling dervishes and aerial silks performances. 

The team then self-experimented spinning at these speeds and times and found it difficult to achieve the third bout of spins at these speeds, as great apes did. Apes were noticeably dizzy at that point in the videos, and they were likely to lose their balance and fall down. 

“This would indicate that the primates deliberately keep spinning, despite starting to feel the effects of dizziness, until they are unable to keep their balance any longer.” explained Dr Marcus Perlman, Lecturer at the Department of English Language and Linguistics of The University of Birmingham who co-led of the research. 

Previous studies which attempted to understand human motivation for self-inducing dizziness focused on substance use such as alcohol or drugs, but it is uncertain whether these or other substances would have been accessible to human ancestors, either because those substances were not available in their environment or because individuals and communities didn’t have the technical and cultural knowledge to produce or process psychoactive substances. Scientists say this new study could be more relevant to explain the role of altered states on the evolution of the human mind.  

“The further back in human history you look, the less certain we can be about the role that substance-induced experiences played in our evolution. It’s not clear whether our ancestors had access to mind altering substances, or if they had the tools and knowledge to create the substance. 

“For example, people may have had access to grapes, but you cannot assume they have the tools or the knowledge to create wine,” Dr Lameira explained.  

Scientists say that further research is needed to understand primates’ motivations for engaging in these behaviours, to understand why our own ancestors might also have been driven to seek out these spinning and mind-altering experiences.  

Dr Lameira adds: “There could be a link to mental health here, as the primates we observed engaging in this behaviour were mostly captive individuals, who may be bored and trying to stimulate their senses in some way. 

“But it could also be a play behaviour. If you think about a child’s playground, almost all the playground apparatus – swings, slides, seesaws and roundabouts or merry-go-rounds – they are all designed to challenge your balance or disrupt the body-mind responses. 

“There are some interesting parallels that should be investigated further, in order to understand why people are motivated to engage in these behaviours. It could very well be that we have been seeking and engaging in mind-altering experiences before we were even modern humans.” 

The paper, 'Great apes reach momentary altered mental states by spinning', is published in Primates.

ENDS 

Notes to editors 

DOI: 10.1007/s10329-023-01056-x 

If you would like to see a copy of the paper, please contact the University of Warwick / University Of Birmingham press office using the contact information below.

Media contacts

Natalie Gidley, University of Warwick, E: natalie.gidley@warwick.ac.uk M: +44 (0) 7824540791

Tony Moran, University of Birmingham E: t.moran@bham.ac.uk  M:  +44 (0)782 783 2312 or out-of-hours E: pressoffice@contacts.bham.ac.uk M: +44 (0) 121 414 2772

 

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JOURNAL

Primates

DOI

10.1007/s10329-023-01056-x 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Great apes reach momentary altered mental states by spinning

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

13-Mar-2023

The Natural Mind

  An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness

    Andrew Weil

https://druglibrary.net/schaffer/lsd/weil.htm

New method paves way for more efficient transformation of captured CO2 into everyday products

New process gives CO2 conversion more "bang for buck"

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

An international team of researchers at the University of Sydney and the University of Toronto has developed a  new acid-based electrochemical process for the conversion of CO2 captured from emission sources or directly from air.

Carbon capture and conversion is gaining momentum worldwide, with the Australian Academy of Science last week publishing a report urging the necessity of coupling carbon capture with a reduction in emissions to cap global heating at 1.5 °C.

The new method, published in Nature Synthesis, differs from previous CO2 conversion methods in that it uses an acidic – not alkaline or neutral – reactive chemical, with the experimental study rendering a twofold improvement in energy efficiency compared to the team’s previous benchmark work, when converting CO2 to multicarbon products such as ethylene and ethanol.

Most commonly derived from oil extraction, multicarbon products are widely used chemicals and raw materials in industry. Ethylene is the precursor of polyethylene – a plastic used in everyday products from packaging to pharmaceuticals.

The catalyst works by applying an acidic electrolyte, with more carbon being utilised for conversion in the process compared with alkaline-based solutions. When being treated with electricity, the catalyst catalyses the CO2 into multicarbon products.

“Our catalyst system allows for more multicarbon products to be converted from CO2, essentially giving carbon capture more “bang for buck” by creating a secondary market of materials,” said Dr Fengwang Li, a corresponding author from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

“However, until now, converting CO2 into multicarbon products in acidic media has been challenging. Using an adlayer system, the catalyst acquires a reactive environment that is favourable for multicarbon formation at an energy-efficient operating condition,” Dr Li said.

The study's lead author, research scientist at the CSIRO Energy Centre, Dr Yong Zhao said: “Governments and industry are becoming increasingly aware of the necessity of carbon capture, but conversion is not just a ‘nice to have’. By converting CO2, rather than simply capturing and burying it, we can create fully circular carbon economies, potentially reducing the reliance of oil extraction to create ethylene.”

“This process is an important step towards creating large-scale carbon capture and conversion systems that turn carbon capture into a value-add industry, thereby increasing its financial viability and creating a more solid commercial basis for carbon removals,” said Dr Zhao, who conducted the research while at the University of Sydney.

“While the overall goal worldwide should be to slash emissions by transitioning to renewables and moving away from the burning of fossil fuels, the transition for heavy industry will take time, making the capturing of CO2 at the emissions site an important interim step,” he said.

The researchers will next look to again double the process’s energy efficiency. “If we want our process to be deployed at scale and  used by industry, we need to double efficiency again and improve stability. That will be our key focus moving forward,” Dr Li said.

DISCLOSURE:

The authors declare no competing interests. The research was financially supported by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (grant no. DE200100477 to F.L.), the Ontario Research Fund—Research Excellence Program (D.S.), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada (D.S.), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 51603114 to L.H.).

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JOURNAL

Nature Synthesis

DOI

10.1038/s44160-022-00234-x 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Conversion of CO2 to multicarbon products in strong acid by controlling the catalyst microenvironment

COI STATEMENT

The authors declare no competing interests. The research was financially supported by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (grant no. DE200100477 to F.L.), the Ontario Research Fund—Research Excellence Program (D.S.), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada (D.S.), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 51603114 to L.H.).

Robots can help improve mental wellbeing at work – as long as they look right

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE CARRIED OUT A STUDY IN A TECH CONSULTANCY FIRM USING TWO DIFFERENT ROBOT WELLBEING COACHES, WHERE 26 EMPLOYEES PARTICIPATED IN WEEKLY ROBOT-LED WELLBEING SESSIONS FOR FOUR WEEKS. ALTHOUGH THE ROBOTS HAD IDENTICAL VOICES, FACIAL EXPRESSIONS, AND SCRIPTS FOR THE SESSIONS, THE ROBOTS’ PHYSICAL APPEARANCE AFFECTED HOW PARTICIPANTS INTERACTED WITH IT. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Robots can be useful as mental wellbeing coaches in the workplace – but perception of their effectiveness depends in large part on what the robot looks like.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge carried out a study in a tech consultancy firm using two different robot wellbeing coaches, where 26 employees participated in weekly robot-led wellbeing sessions for four weeks. Although the robots had identical voices, facial expressions, and scripts for the sessions, the robots’ physical appearance affected how participants interacted with it.

Participants who did their wellbeing exercises with a toy-like robot said that they felt more of a connection with their ‘coach’ than participants who worked with a humanoid-like robot. The researchers say that perception of robots is affected by popular culture, where the only limit on what robots can do is the imagination. When faced with a robot in the real world however, it often does not live up to expectations.

Since the toy-like robot looks simpler, participants may have had lower expectations and ended up finding the robot easier to talk connect with. Participants who worked with the humanoid robot found that their expectations didn’t match reality, since the robot was not capable of having interactive conversations.

Despite the differences between expectations and reality, the researchers say that their study shows that robots can be a useful tool to promote mental wellbeing in the workplace. The results will be reported today (15 March) at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Stockholm.

The World Health Organization recommends that employers take action to promote and protect mental wellbeing at work, but the implementation of wellbeing practices is often limited by a lack of resources and personnel. Robots have shown some early promise for helping address this gap, but most studies on robots and wellbeing have been conducted in a laboratory setting.

“We wanted to take the robots out of the lab and study how they might be useful in the real world,” said Dr Micol Spitale, the paper’s first author.

The researchers collaborated with local technology company Cambridge Consultants to design and implement a workplace wellbeing programme using robots. Over the course of four weeks, employees were guided through four different wellbeing exercises by one of two robots: either the QTRobot (QT) or the Misty II robot (Misty).

The QT is a childlike humanoid robot and roughly 90cm tall, while Misty is a 36cm tall toy-like robot. Both robots have screen faces that can be programmed with different facial expressions.

“We interviewed different wellbeing coaches and then we programmed our robots to have a coach-like personality, with high openness and conscientiousness,” said co-author Minja Axelsson. “The robots were programmed to have the same personality, the same facial expressions and the same voice, so the only difference between them was the physical robot form.”

Participants in the experiment were guided through different positive psychology exercises by a robot in an office meeting room. Each session started with the robot asking participants to recall a positive experience or describe something in their lives they were grateful for, and the robot would ask follow-up questions. After the sessions, participants were asked to assess the robot with a questionnaire and an interview. Participants did one session per week for four weeks, and worked with the same robot for each session.

Person interacting with Misty II robot 

Researchers from the University of Cambridge carried out a study in a tech consultancy firm using two different robot wellbeing coaches, where 26 employees participated in weekly robot-led wellbeing sessions for four weeks. Although the robots had identical voices, facial expressions, and scripts for the sessions, the robots’ physical appearance affected how participants interacted with it.

CREDIT

University of Cambridge

Participants who worked with the toy-like Misty robot reported that they had a better working connection with the robot than participants who worked with the child-like QT robot. Participants also had a more positive perception of Misty overall.

“It could be that since the Misty robot is more toy-like, it matched their expectations,” said Spitale. “But since QT is more humanoid, they expected it to behave like a human, which may be why participants who worked with QT were slightly underwhelmed.”

“The most common response we had from participants was that their expectations of the robot didn’t match with reality,” said Professor Hatice Gunes from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, who led the research. “We programmed the robots with a script, but participants were hoping there would be more interactivity. It’s incredibly difficult to create a robot that’s capable of natural conversation. New developments in large language models could really be beneficial in this respect.”

“Our perceptions of how robots should look or behave might be holding back the uptake of robotics in areas where they can be useful,” said Axelsson.

Although the robots used in the experiment are not as advanced as C-3PO or other fictional robots, participants still said they found the wellbeing exercises helpful, and that they were open to the idea of talking to a robot in future.

“The robot can serve as a physical reminder to commit to the practice of wellbeing exercises,” said Gunes. “And just saying things out loud, even to a robot, can be helpful when you’re trying to improve mental wellbeing.”

The team is now working to enhance the robot coaches’ responsiveness during the coaching practices and interactions.

The research was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Hatice Gunes is a Staff Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

The new normal already? Examining changing probability of a summer-like fall

Peer-Reviewed Publication

POHANG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (POSTECH)

 

IMAGE: TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTION OVER SOUTH KOREA DURING 2021 EARLY OCTOBER. view more 

CREDIT: POSTECH

In October 2021, South Korea experienced a heatwave of an unprecedented magnitude. During the first half of the month, the average temperature was recorded at 19.9 °C, marking a 3.9 °C increase above the normal. This event was unparalleled, anticipated to arise only once in thousands of years. The abnormal warmth was triggered by a delayed appearance of an anomalous high pressure, which typically occurs during midsummer, leading to daily maximum temperatures of over 30°C in the southern region. This resulted in significant socioeconomic damages including agriculture across the country. A similar temperature spike with extreme magnitude has occurred in November 2022, raising public awareness of the intensifying fall heatwaves.

 

A research team at POSTECH led by Professor Seung-Ki Min and Research Professor Yeon-Hee Kim (Division of Environmental Science and Engineering) confirmed the record-high temperature recorded in October 2021 would have been highly improbable without the influence of global warming. This study was conducted in collaboration with the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, the National Institute of Meteorological Sciences, and the U.K. Met Office. The research findings were featured in a special issue of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

 

The team used large datasets from CMIP6 global climate models and the U.K. Met Office’s large ensemble simulations to understand the impact of human activities on the unprecedented high temperatures. They assessed changes in probabilities of how frequent extremely high temperatures such as those of October 2021 could occur due to human-induced global warming. Additionally, the team, for the first time, quantified how often such heatwaves may occur during future fall seasons under different greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

 

The researchers confirmed that without the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases, high temperatures like those in October 2021 would have been extremely unlikely to occur. Even model simulations including greenhouse gas increases showed such high temperatures would happen very rarely, only once in hundreds of years. The team also predicted that without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the frequency of October 2021-like fall heatwaves is likely to increase dramatically with such warming likely occurring once every two years in the 2060s. However, if we can achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement to limit the global mean temperature to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, extreme fall warmth would happen only once every 30 to 40 years. This provides important implications for the expansion of the summer season that is occurring rapidly and strongly across the Northern extra-tropics.

 

“As unprecedented high temperatures during fall are occurring more frequently, it is necessary to provide an accurate prediction of their near-term occurrences and also prepare corresponding adaptation measures to minimize associated damages in all socioeconomic fields,” remarked Professor Seung-Ki Min.

 

This study was conducted with the support from the Mid-Career Researcher Program and the Science Research Center Program (Irreversible Climate Change Research Center) of the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Probability of 2021 October-like heatwave in current and future climate simulations.

CREDIT

POSTECH

JOURNAL

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

DOI

10.1175/BAMS-D-22-0124.1 

ARTICLE TITLE

Attribution of the Unprecedented 2021 October Heatwave in South Korea

Tax policy may not be enough to combat climate change

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA

A new paper in The Review of Economic Studies, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that carbon taxes will be less effective at reducing carbon emissions than previously thought. It also finds that tax interventions needed to achieve goals agreed upon in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016 will need to be larger than previously thought.

There is growing interest among researchers and policymakers in using economic policy to reduce or eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. Policy can reduce carbon emissions in several ways, including pushing the economy towards cleaner sources of energy and decreasing overall energy use. The researchers here studied the impact of climate policy on total energy use and found that policy-induced reductions in energy use take significantly longer than predicted in existing models. They argue that improvements in energy efficiency technology are an important component of reductions in energy use, but that technological adjustment takes time. The world will not see the benefits of policy immediately.

The researchers developed a model of economic growth and energy efficiency with endogenous technical change to study the impact of climate change mitigation policies on energy use. They argue that this model can accurately recreate patterns of energy use and economic growth observed in the data, and show that the standard model economists use to evaluate climate policy cannot. This is because the standard model does not account for the slow-moving nature of technological progress. As a result, the standard model overstates the reduction in cumulative energy use achieved by a given energy tax. They show that policies designed to meet the Paris Agreement target in the standard model miss the target by a significant amount in the newer model that accounts for slow-moving technology dynamics. The newer model requires significantly higher taxes to achieve the target.

The researchers also examined the impact of research and development subsidies meant to improve energy efficiency. They find that combining these policies with taxes helps meet environmental targets at the lowest cost to the economy. However, these policies are not as effective at decreasing energy use on their own. Subsidies might lead to an initial round of improvements in energy-efficient technologies, but later the incentive for subsequent research and development is reduced.

“In order to achieve environmental policy goals, taxes on energy will need to be higher than previously thought,” said the paper’s lead author, Gregory Casey. “This is because the impact of taxes on total energy use happens more slowly than suggested by earlier modeling approaches. I only study one facet of climate policy, and I hope that the results will help improve the next generation of climate-economy models.”

The paper, “Energy Efficiency and Directed Technical Change: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation,” is available (at midnight on March 15th ) at: https://academic.oup.com/restud/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/restud/rdad001.

To request a copy of the study, please contact:
Daniel Luzer 
daniel.luzer@oup.com

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JOURNAL

The Review of Economic Studies

DOI

10.1093/restud/rdad001 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The Review of Economic Studies

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Mar-2023

Rapid surge in highly contagious killer fungus poses new threat to amphibians across Africa

Worst wildlife disease in history began to spread widely in Africa in the year 2000 and may be causing overlooked epizootics

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FRONTIERS

Mass fungus infections that drive populations worldwide to near-collapse don’t just occur in science fiction. Chytridiomycosis, the worst vertebrate disease in recorded history, has already wiped out hundreds of species of amphibians around the world. Due to a large part to this fungal disease, 41% of amphibians are currently threatened with extinction. Only species living in Africa seemed to have been relatively spared from the scourge of chytridiomycosis – at least so far.

Now, a study in Frontiers in Conservation Science has shown that this reprieve was likely temporary: the results show that the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), the pathogen that causes chytridiomycosis, is by now firmly established throughout Africa. It may so far have been overlooked there, but it is likely that the pathogen will spread further and cause epizootics across Africa in the near future.

“We show that Bd has become more prevalent and widespread across the continent of Africa since the year 2000,” said Dr Vance Vredenburg, a professor at the San Francisco State University and University of California Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Berkeley, and the study’s corresponding author.

“This rapid surge may signal that disease-driven declines and extinctions of amphibians may already be occurring in Africa without anyone knowing about it.”

Exceptionally contagious

Bd is a chytridiomycid fungus, a basic group of fungi that produces asexual ‘swarm spores’, which use a whip-like flagellum to swim. Bd spores thrive in cool, moist habitats, and become embedded and multiply in the keratinized mouthparts and skin of salamanders, newts, and caecilians, but especially frogs and toads. Chytridiomycosis is exceptionally contagious, since it doesn’t need an animal vector to spread, while the spores can infect at least 1,000 distantly related species. The disease rarely kills tadpoles, but often kills adults, in which it causes the sloughing off of skin, lethargy, weight loss, and ultimately cardiac arrest.

The first known chytridiomycosis epizootics occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s in western North America, in the late 1990s in Central America and Australia, and in the early 2000s in South America. Genetic analyses has shown that besides the strain Bd-GPL (‘Global Pandemic Lineage’), thought to be responsible for most chytridiomycosis epizootics, at least four other, possibly less virulent strains from South Korea, Switzerland, South America, and southern Africa exist today.

Some species, for example the marine toad and the American bullfrog, seem relatively immune, while there is also evidence that previously devastated populations may currently be evolving a degree of resistance to the pathogen.

Study covering 171 years

Here, Vredenburg and colleagues first used quantitative real-time PCR to determine if 2,972 museum specimens were infected with any known strain of Bd. These had been collected from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Tanzania, and Uganda between 1908 and 2013 and were kept at the California Academy of Sciences, the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley, and Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. They also tested the skin swabs from 1,651 live amphibians caught between 2011 and 2013 in Burundi, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo for infection with Bd. Finally, they looked through the scientific literature from between 1852 and 2017 for records of the presence or absence of visible chytridiomycosis infection in amphibians from across Africa. All told, the study analyzed patterns of pathogen presence in over 16,900 amphibians.

In this study they present estimates for the prevalence of Bd infection over time for Africa as a whole, individual countries, and regions.

Millennium bug

The results show that the earliest Bd-positive amphibian in the dataset dated from 1933 in Cameroon. The infection prevalence across Africa as a whole stayed below 5% for every decade between the 1930s up to 2000. But that same year, the infection prevalence suddenly jumped to 17.2%, and increased further to 21.6% during the 2010s. In countries for which more data are available, such as Cameroon, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, and Burundi, this jump after 2000 in prevalence was even more pronounced: for example up to 73.7% of samples were infected in Burundi.

An exception was South Africa, where positive samples were found as far back as 1943, and the infection prevalence was relatively steady (approximately 23.3%, including the local strain Bd-CAPE) from the 1970s through the end of the study.

The authors conclude that since 2000, there has been a largely overlooked but major increase in the prevalence of Bd, which poses a new threat to amphibians across Africa. The regions most at risk are eastern, central, and western Africa.

“We don’t have a good idea of why the change seems most evident around 2000 in Africa, that is later than on other continents. This could be due to chance,” said Vredenburg.

“But there is also a hypothesis that climate change-induced stress could make amphibians more susceptible to pathogens, or that the climate may be changing such that the climate envelope for the pathogen is becoming more common. It’s likely that increased air travel of humans and cargo is also a culprit.”

“The first thing that needs to be done is that we need to find out whether amphibians in the areas we identified as high Bd prevalence are experiencing epizootics. What we need is a dynamic picture of the pathogen-host interaction,” said Vredenburg.

“Eliminating this microscopic pathogen in the wild is not possible, but we know that if given the opportunity, many host species can survive. Since this pathogen appears to be moved globally by humans, we have a moral imperative to get involved and try to manage and mitigate whenever possible.”

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Conservation Science

DOI

10.3389/fcosc.2023.1069490 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Continent-wide recent emergence of a global pathogen in African amphibians

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Mar-2023